The latter.

There's a sense in one particular scene - at the hospital, with her brother, that it's not the act, it's the guilt that triggers it . That could actually be a very deft handling of a shift. Er, as long as I'm reading the author's intent correctly and not the just rejiggerings of one of her readers.

Marks got "The Fighting Uruk-Hai" chapter up, and he immediately focused on the description of the Orks as "Mongol-type." He went into this speech about the horrible racism and how he's just going to have to forgive Tolkien for basing his evil race on Asians. For a change, most of the comments seem to be challenging his interpretation instead of just agreeing with it. I suspect a different pool of commenters than those who are following Mark Watches.

Well, except I do think Tolkien does indulge in a lot of race essentialism in LotR. Anybody invested in the Aryan ideal would recognize it in all that talk about the True Race of Men/Númenórean stuff. And it's not just the Orcs he describes in terms of the savage other. All of those oliphaunt riders are from the East: swarthy, exotic etc.

Yeah, I've yet to see convincing challenges to the point, and it's not like Peter Jackson fought the good fight.

But I don't have the energy to read Mark to see that particular conversation right now.

Anybody invested in the Aryan ideal would recognize it

Which isn't Tolkien, considering the letter he wrote to a German publisher who wanted to know Tolkien's racial antecedents before translating The Hobbit.

Marks got "The Fighting Uruk-Hai" chapter up, and he immediately focused on the description of the Orks as "Mongol-type." He went into this speech about the horrible racism and how he's just going to have to forgive Tolkien for basing his evil race on Asians.

I just read that chapter. To clarify: he asserts that the racism applies not just to the physical description of the Orcs, but also to their language, personal behavior, and inability to get along--basically he's claiming that Tolkien actually believed Asian people were like that, and applied that to the Orcs.

Which, to me, is a bit of a stretch. Tolkien wasn't particularly unusual in his beliefs for the time, and the racism in LotR seems to me to be fairly subtextual, mostly having to do with the way the bad guys all have darker complexions, whether they're human or not.

The comments I saw challenging him on that seemed to be pretty fair. Mark means well, but I wish he would dial back on the extended digressions.

Anyway, if you want a better chapter-by-chapter discussion of LotR, find Kate Nepveu's index on Tor.com. She doesn't try to avoid spoilers, and as a result you get a really thoughtful discussion of theme and narrative structure.

Which isn't Tolkien,

I think it is. The way Tolkien talks about the race of men, and how they've become debased over time and there was this golden ideal is entirely consistent with the ideals of Aryan supremacy.

All those notions were very common in England, and Western Europe as well as Germany through the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. (i.e., Tolkien's formative years)

It's as much the cornerstone of the British Empire and their justifications for colonizing India and Africa as it was for the Third Reich.

The ideals that informed the Nazi culture weren't made up in Hitler's noggin - they were very commonly held pseudoscience beliefs that were widespread through Western culture.

America too, obviously. The Nazi's based their eugenics programs on the Indiana Eugenics Law of 1907.

Anyway, Tolkien endorses a lot of those notions. I'm not saying he's a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer, but his core beliefs come from the same sources.

basically he's claiming that Tolkien actually believed Asian people were like that, and applied that to the Orcs

Thank you for clearing that up. That's not the sort of racist I think of Tolkien as being.

Thank you for clearing that up. That's not the sort of racist I think of Tolkien as being.

No, me neither.

I do think he's got a strong streak of "West/British good, East/Asia BAD" in his writing and on my last reread I really was struck at how many times Aragorn's awesomeness was attributed to his awesomely pure Western blood.